The German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, announced on Sunday night he wanted to bring forward the general election after a catastrophic poll defeat for his party in the country’s most populous state.
Taking most political observers by surprise, he said he would seek to go to the polls in the autumn, although the next general election had not been due until late next year.
Bringing it forward is a high-risk strategy which could mean loss of office for the chancellor, who has trailed the conservative opposition in opinion polls since winning a second term three years ago.
Speaking from his office in Berlin, Schröder on Sunday night confirmed that he would set out to persuade the President, Horst Köhler, to hold elections for the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, ”as quickly as possible”.
He said that after Sunday’s crushing defeat by the conservatives in North Rhine-Westphalia — where the Social Democrat party (SPD) had held power for 39 years — the basis for his government’s policies was no longer there, and he was now seeking the clear support of Germans for his reforms.
”It is my duty and responsibility,” he said.
Schröder’s ostensible reason for an early election — the conservatives’ increased majority in the upper house — is mystifying. Sunday’s victory still leaves the opposition short of the two-thirds majority that would allow them to block all government plans.
In reality, the chancellor appears to be trying to regain the initiative by holding early polls. Germany’s last national elections were held in September 2002, when he narrowly won re-election in a coalition with the Greens.
Since then Schröder has suffered a series of dismal election defeats and has been consistently behind in the polls. He has also come under pressure from leftwingers in his SPD to abandon controversial reforms introduced this year to the welfare state.
The issue that appears to have cost him Sunday’s regional election was unemployment, which this year passed the five-million mark.
On Sunday night Angela Merkel, leader of the main conservative opposition party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), hailed her party’s victory in North Rhine-Westphalia as a sensational result, adding: ”Early elections would be good for the country.
”We are well prepared and will fight a determined and engaged campaign. Every day on which the red-green coalition doesn’t govern is a good day for Germany.”
While it would be unwise to write Schröder off, Germany appears to be heading for a centre-right government, with Merkel as the country’s first woman chancellor.
The CDU dominated national politics during the Helmut Kohl era in the 1980s and 1990s, before he lost power to Schröder in 1998.
Although Merkel has been fancifully compared to Margaret Thatcher, most analysts believe she would be unlikely to dump Germany’s social market economic model in favour of a more liberalised Anglo-Saxon system.
A CDU government could also pose several problems for Tony Blair’s presidency of the European Union later this year. For example, the party is implacably opposed to Turkish membership of the EU.
There are few recent precedents for an early election under Germany’s system. It appears that Schröder will have to deliberately lose a vote of confidence in Parliament before the Constitutional Court will allow an early election.
”It’s political suicide. I’m furious,” one Social Democrat activist who declined to be named, said on Sunday night. – Guardian Unlimited